The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mayor defends letter to employer
Reed asked how firm would ‘resolve’ matter after ‘racist pig’ post.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed defended Monday his decision to contact United Consulting, a city vendor that also employs embattled Gwinnett County Commissioner Tommy Hunter.
Reed last week sent a threatening letter to the Norcross-based engineering firm, denouncing the content of Hunter’s now infamous Jan. 14 Facebook post — in which he called civil rights leader and U.S. Rep. John Lewis a “racist pig” — and asking how the company planned to “resolve this matter.”
United Consulting CEO Reza Abree sent a letter back to the mayor Friday afternoon, saying the commissioner had been “disciplined as any other employee with the company would be disciplined for such a transgression.” What, exactly, that discipline entailed is unclear.
At a Monday morning event at the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, Reed defended his decision to make what he called “an inquiry about [Hunter’s] employment.”
“So the vendor responded to us,” Reed said, “but the bottom line is that an employee with their company called Congressman John Lewis a racist pig. We are a customer of that company, so it was wholly appropriate for us to say, you know, ‘What is going on with this individual in your organization?’”
According to United Consulting’s website, its work for the city of Atlanta has included nearly a decade of consulting with the Department of Watershed Management and investigating contamination at the Chattahoochee Water Treatment Plant, among other projects. Hunter is a vice president of business development.
Reed’s letter to the company also triggered a pointed war of
words last week with Seth Weathers, a consultant who has acted as Hunter’s spokesman. Asked Friday about the mayor’s letter, Weathers suggested Reed was trying to “divert attention away from himself and his corruption scandal in the city of Atlanta.”
That was a reference to the federal bribery investigation currently rocking Atlanta City Hall. Two contractors have pleaded guilty to paying bribes to get city contracts, and Atlanta’s chief procurement officer was fired last week as federal agents seized items from his office. Reed has not been implicated in the ongoing investigation.
Asked about Weathers’ comments, a spokesperson for Reed then sent a statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution saying the city was “entirely within our rights to communicate our dissatisfaction” with United Consulting.
“Hunter is familiar with allegations of corruption in his home county’s government,” the statement said, in part, “and should know all too well how it feels to be linked with a matter that you were not aware of nor involved in.”
The ethics complaint filed against Hunter earlier this month claims he violated tenets of Gwinnett’s ethics ordinance, which was adopted in 2011 amid a corruption scandal involving shady land deals and multiple county commissioners. Hunter was first elected to the Board of Commissioners in 2012.